The success of "The Dangerous Book for Boys" — which has been on the best-seller list for the last nine months — and its step-by-step instructions for activities like folding paper airplanes is testament to the generalized longing for play’s good old days. So were the questions after Stuart Brown’s library talk; one woman asked how her children will learn trust, empathy and social skills when their most frequent playing is done online. Brown told her that while video games do have some play value, a true sense of "interpersonal nuance" can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all five senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.

This is part of a larger conversation Americans are having about play. Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits. Alarming headlines about U.S. students falling behind other countries in science and math, combined with the ever-more-intense competition to get kids into college, make parents rush to sign up their children for piano lessons and test-prep courses instead of just leaving them to improvise on their own; playtime versus résumé building.

Discussions about play force us to reckon with our underlying ideas about childhood, sex differences, creativity and success. Do boys play differently than girls? Are children being damaged by staring at computer screens and video games? Are they missing something when fantasy play is populated with characters from Hollywood’s imagination and not their own? Most of these issues are too vast to be addressed by a single field of study (let alone a magazine article). But the growing science of play does have much to add to the conversation.

Taking Play Seriously

Po Bronson, in New York Magazine:

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons -- to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

Learning to Lie

New cameras don't just capture photons; they compute pictures.

The digital camera has brought a revolutionary shift in the nature of photography, sweeping aside more than 150 years of technology based on the weird and wonderful photochemistry of silver halide crystals. Curiously, though, the camera itself has come through this transformation with remarkably little change. A digital camera has a silicon sensor where the film used to go, and there's a new display screen on the back, but the lens and shutter and the rest of the optical system work just as they always have, and so do most of the controls. The images that come out of the camera also look much the same—at least until you examine them microscopically.

But further changes in the art and science of photography may be coming soon. Imaging laboratories are experimenting with cameras that don't merely digitize an image but also perform extensive computations on the image data. Some of the experiments seek to improve or augment current photographic practices, for example by boosting the dynamic range of an image (preserving detail in both the brightest and dimmest areas) or by increasing the depth of field (so that both near and far objects remain in focus). Other innovations would give the photographer control over factors such as motion blur. And the wildest ideas challenge the very notion of the photograph as a realistic representation. Future cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects. Or a camera might have a setting that would cause it to render images in the style of watercolors or pen-and-ink drawings.

Computational Photography

Tuning one's shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. Heterogeneity allows some agents to reach much better temperatures, at the cost of higher risk.

Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity

To understand consciousness and its evolution, we need to ask the right questions.

Questioning Consciousness

Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich.

When Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The God Illusion, and Craig Venter, first Decoder of the human genome meet, the members of the audience feel privileged to be allowed to listen, while straining to understand the ideas. The two philosophers are united. "Genetics became a part of the information technology", recognizes Dawkins. The increasing understanding of the composition of our genes and their complex interaction is "the largest revolution in the history self realization of humans".

Life: A Gene-Centric View

See also, from the archive:

You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming

PHD Comics: Your Research Interests

New from B. A. Huberman:

We analyze the role that popularity and novelty play in attracting the attention of users to dynamic websites. We do so by determining the performance of three different strategies that can be utilized to maximize attention. The first one prioritizes novelty while the second emphasizes popularity. A third strategy looks myopically into the future and prioritizes stories that are expected to generate the most clicks within the next few minutes. We show that the first two strategies should be selected on the basis of the rate of novelty decay, while the third strategy performs sub-optimally in most cases. We also demonstrate that the relative performance of the first two strategies as a function of the rate of novelty decay changes abruptly around a critical value, resembling a phase transition in the physical world.

Popularity, Novelty and Attention

Do we grow old because of natural cellular mechanisms or because of gradually accumulated environmental toxins, like lead?

Growing old in the age of lead

Good news for Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse:

Sedentary lifestyles could make you old before your time.

Live slow die young